Industrial Life Photograph Collection

During the 1930s, Harvard colleagues Donald Davenport and Frank Ayres acquired photographs illustrating the interaction of worker and machine to supplement classroom instruction at the Harvard Business School, where there was an increasing focus on industrial relations. Now called the Industrial Life Photograph Collection, it contains 2,106 black and white prints of various sizes. The photographs depict the operations of more than 115 different companies. The images include men and women at work, production methods, research laboratories, factory exteriors, offices, completed products, and manufactured equipment, such as agricultural and road-building machinery, in use. Most photographs illustrate factory operations in the early 1930s. Some appear to depict earlier scenes, possibly from the 1910s and 1920s. The majority of the photographs represent American businesses, but companies in Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia are also included.